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Data Deposit Box shrinks the farm before the SWARM

Data centre rack real estate reduced by 80 per cent

An SMB backup-to-the-cloud biz has shrunk its rack real estate by 82 per cent, moving from paired Dell storage server boxes to a swarm of object storage boxes.

Data Deposit Box, which started operations in 2002, has more than 60,000 customers for its service. An OEM deal meant that customer base could increase markedly, which prompted a storage re-think.

It shrank 28 racks in its Toronto data centre to just 5 by implementing a Caringo SWARM object storage back-end for its cloud back-up storage. This meant opex savings of over $50,000 per month. Not bad.

Troy Cheeseman, Data Deposit Box president, said; “We were using Dell hardware (2 servers paired) and MD1000s and 1200s, as well as stand-alone Dell 720s.” These servers were between 3 and 5 years old.

The company had gained Caringo experience already: “We leveraged [Caringo] pre-Swarm in a POC and then implemented in our Dallas facility as a first launch. Since that successful launch, we have invested in a consolidation effort in our Toronto facility, which was due for an upgrade. With SWARM as our storage centre, we have been able to consolidate our storage servers into our SWARM cluster, which reduced our footprint, increased our capacity and lowered our administrative requirements.”

Cheeseman said object storage was great: “With Caringo, you can manage multiple petabytes with one resource. This completely changes our ability to scale and grow to meet all of our client demands.”

There is now more than 1PB of SWARM storage across multiple data centres with replication distributing the erasure coding-protected data. Maybe you could mount a raid on your racks with object storage too? ®

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